My biggest fear here is coming off incredibly pretentious. Despite that, I believe I fully realize pretentious asinine behavior to the greatest extent.
That said, the biggest caveat of interactive media is pigeon-holing it to other forms of media. Granted, with each new form of presentation since the book, we've taken media and compiled it anew with a fresh new element. From there is where you add the visual to the novel to create Film. From there, you add interactivity, and you get the Video Game, which hardly seems creative when compared to the brand new terminologies derived for the prior examples. Barring Theater (or Theatre) from these examples is negligent because it's been around forever and can do all of those things and more without limit because it's always alive. Of course, I am looking at media here, which is something in itself immortalized, so it must be stricken from the record.
This is the problem, however, the more freedom we get and the closer we get to imitating life, the more closed-in the product becomes. The beauty of Theater isn't that it is life, but that it breaks free of it within its own constraints: naturally, a struggle. The wanton necessitation to imitate old, derelict forms of media to add some qualifications to Video Games is so incredibly absurd when they are so much more advanced. Unless it's used for novelty, there's no reason to replicate aged methods. Instead, it's unfortunately made the standard.
I am not against having a form of story in the traditional sense of the term within a Video Game. By all means, one should not be stifled when creating an artistic vision. However, to inflate one's head and add various Tarantino tricks of the trade to a game and egregiously ape subtlety from others without fully understanding what makes subtlety subtlety, and not nothing, and call it original and a story that can only be told through Video Games is a blast against one's self and the well-being of others.
Branching story paths does not a video game make. Adventure novels have done this for years. They still persist to this day. Again, there is Theater that exists as improvisation, and films that deviate from their original paths and even incorporate multiple endings: Clue, for example. Even comic books poll the readership to see if sidekicks live or die. I reiterate: Multiplicity does not an absolute interactive Video Game make.
Then what story can only be told through Video Game? The best example I can give of this now is MAG, which itself is not the perfect example, but shall shed some light. MAG is a multiplayer-only first-person shooter exclusive to the PlayStation 3, that has almost no story. It has a loose body of framework to justify its existence, then it lets players fight on a team of 128 other live players against another set of another 128 live players simultaneously: in the same instance.
How does this have anything to do with story? Let me break it down: There are 3 PMCs fighting one another in the near future. 2 PMCs will face off at a time trying to hold their oil supply lines, or trying to destroy the others'. Each player can only have one character and must choose one PMC, and has to level up through that PMC or start afresh, with no abilities. The over-arching goal is that if one PMC destroys enough of anothers' supplies or retains enough of their own, they'll win oil contracts, which grant incredible benefits during battle.
Again, what does this have to do with story? This somewhat bare-bones approach is exactly what interactive media is all about. The story is 90% composed by the audience (or players, in this case). The other 10% is the story and assets built by the developers as ground work and the gameplay motivators that generate a need for large-scale leadership and personal and group advancement. The player derives that they are a part of a dark shadow war and choose to align themselves with the faction that best suits their personality, whether it be with a group seeking the best in technological advancements, the group fighting for their civil liberty on a global scale, or the group seeking a way to end the global conflict. They become committed, with only one as an option. The players may then join a clan which will be their own personal squad with which they can grow with and form bonds on an entirely real level, dictated through the game, and as they grow with their squad, their personal abilities increase and they may shape themselves to suit their needs and the needs of their squad and their PMC as a whole. The story is different and unique to each player and even allows for advancement up to the highest level where they may command an entire company of 128 soldiers on a large real-time scale. However, the overall story is created by the cooperation of hundred of thousands of players and minute scales and grand scales, at many different levels with several different interpersonal story threads invented by the player-base as a whole. Victory and defeat is shared in-game with comrades and this is then extended even outside of the game, in social forums and the like, taking the interactive media all the way to the point where it goes beyond mere entertainment.
So you see, it is the containment, rules, and old standards that confine interactive media in this day and age, along with the thought process that games like MAG having no bearing or story hierarchy, when, in fact, the story is rich and deep, and subtle in ways that make full use of the weighted word. The next step would be to fully utilize the concept of interactivity in the medium that has it in the title: Interactive Media.
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Excellent post. I enjoyed it very much.
ReplyDeleteWould you say the type of story you're referring to is what is now becomingly called "emergent gameplay?" (As in, the story emerges from the player's actions, rather than a pre-defined narrative)
Exactly that, but unfortunately, emergent gameplay is such a heavy buzzword right now, I stray from using it. Because the concept is so new and scarcely utilized, its use is vague for the moment, which causes it to be thrown around willy-nilly.
ReplyDeleteGames like Left4Dead are excellent games, but their story plays out in a linear sequence regardless of what the player does. Certainly there are times when the AI will throw a few more enemies at you from surprising locations, but it doesn't change what happens or how the experience has meaning.
That's the most important element: the meaning. Group unification and social interaction is how we derive meaning in the first place. Setting all of the actual events on the player allows them to derive meaning on their own personal and interpersonal level, to give the game a depth that is often wonderfully subtle.
Putting aside games that have multiple ways of play and all the other games that would pose themselves as emergent, you have games like EVE Online, which has an entire economy defined by the player-base. Their drive and social interaction through business structure and high science fiction allowed them to create a world to their well-being that they have investments in that have actual consequences in the game world that then extend to social forums outside of the game world. That game is defined by the social hierarchy that players en mass created for it.
For example: One group of people created a corporation that took off in the game world over several years until it become one of the leading game drivers of economy. The players that were the head of that corporation essentially dictated the way the economy in the game world ran due to their over-whelming influence. Eventually one player group corporation of assassins had some of their members infiltrate the corporation, and over the course of six months, worked their way to the top alongside the heads of the in-game corporation.
When they had the chance, he assassinated the heads and CEO of the corporation and dissolved it as a whole, whilst robbing them of years and years worth of assets.
This may sound insane and made up, but you can read it here:
http://eve.klaki.net/heist/
and anywhere Google is available.
This may sound incredibly complicated and it is, and not every example of emergent gameplay could be as such, but it certainly isn't the term that is thrown around haphazardly to describe games like Portal and Scribblenauts, etc.